Starting with LeBron James Ad, Intel Ramps Up Efforts to Foster Enthusiasm for Autonomous Cars

Pete Bigelow

Oct 25, 2017

YouTube/Intel, Associated Press

The surest signal yet that automated vehicles are inching closer to reaching American roads arrives not via a big announcement about testing in New York City nor the deployment of a fleet of hundreds of cars in Phoenix. Instead, it’s the sight of LeBron James relaxing in the rear seat of a driverless sedan. With the basketball season under way, Intel has aired a television ad called “Fearless” (embedded below) that features the Cleveland Cavaliers superstar. In the spot, his initial reluctance to trust a vehicle that pulls to the curb without a human driver transforms into unbridled enthusiasm for the technology in the span of 30 seconds.

It might take longer for an apprehensive public to follow his lead. Surveys show a majority of Americans are reluctant to ride in automated vehicles, a problematic figure for industry officials who believe the technology will reach streets sooner than is generally expected. Intel chief executive officer Brian Krzanich said the ad is intended to help establish the trustworthiness of autonomous vehicles.

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“The idea is to get people interested and to understand
that it is safe.”

— Brian Krzanich, Intel

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“The technology is moving quickly, and different types of vehicles are going to start coming out next year,” he told Car and Driver. “Either it will be driverless taxis on relatively fixed routes, like we’ve talked about [doing] with Waymo next year, or we’ll have cars with on-ramp-to-off-ramp capability. The idea is to get people interested and to understand that it is safe.”

Viewers might first be perplexed to find that Intel, the Silicon Valley chip maker, is responsible for the autonomous-vehicle industry’s first major television spot. But over the past year, the company has spent billions to strengthen its autonomous ambitions and gone public regarding its long-standing role in powering systems designed for Google’s self-driving-car project.

Krzanich himself has assumed a larger public role in addressing the broader realm of autonomous driving; he is slated to deliver keynote addresses over the next three months at both the Los Angeles auto show and the CES technology show. We sat down with him in Detroit last week to discuss Intel’s recent push in shaping autonomous driving, regulatory developments, and, perhaps most important, the company’s intention of having a big say in how the technology is presented to skeptical consumers.

Intel forged a partnership with BMW and computer-vision software company Mobileye last year, the latter of which it acquired earlier this year for $15 billion. Their alliance, which now includes Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, announced plans to deploy a pilot project involving at least 40 autonomous vehicles by the end of 2017. With little more than two months remaining this year, Krzanich remained tight-lipped on those plans but affirmed they remain on track. “I believe they’re on schedule, with everything I’ve seen,” he said.

Separately, Mobileye remains on track to build a fleet of roughly 100 test vehicles equipped with automated systems that don’t require a driver behind a wheel. Those vehicles will be dispatched to locations in the United States, Europe, and Israel, and Krzanich said the first batch will arrive by the end of 2017 and the remainder by the close of 2018.

Beyond those test vehicles, Intel already operates a small fleet of test vehicles at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, where researchers conducted a small study, gauging reactions and responses of 10 participants to fully automated vehicles before, during, and after their first rides. Seven key findings emerged from their project. Perhaps most interesting among them was that there were clear contradictions in the way people both embraced and worried about autonomous travel.

YouTube/Intel, Associated Press

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Monday, March 13, 2017, after the company announced its intention to buy Mobileye.

Intel plans more research with a larger group of participants. All of this fits within the company’s intentions of preparing the public for these cars.

Perhaps the most consequential way to do that is by touting the prospective safety of autonomous cars, which have been widely billed as a moral imperative because they offer the promise of improving safety and reducing traffic fatalities. It’s an alluring message, especially at a time when road deaths are rising. But this promise often remains vague, with few specifics in terms of the savings.

Last week, Mobileye published a white paper that marks an exception to that ambiguity. The company’s chief technology officer wrote that the number of traffic deaths in America could be cut from roughly 40,000 per year to 40 if regulators and businesses agreed to standardize some rules for automated vehicles to follow. The paper, “A Plan to Develop Safe Autonomous Vehicles, and Prove It,” says such rules could ensure an autonomous car crash happens about as often as a wing falls off a commercial airliner in midflight.

Krzanich said an agreement on common rules would add clarity to crash investigations and help define liability.

“You can kind of look at it as there’s two ways to build the way the car drives,” he said. “One is, I just respond to what I see. The other way is to look at the environment and have a set of rules that says, hey, I’m driving down a two-lane road, and there are all these cars parked along the side, and someone could run out. I have a rule that says, ‘Don’t exceed this speed based on my stopping distance.’ ”

Machine-caused traffic deaths will always draw greater scrutiny, but it’s important, Krzanich said, to get to a point where “society and governments do not focus on the 40 deaths that could still occur but focus on the 39,960 deaths that we’ve prevented and eliminated from the system.”